No Rock And Roll Fun

LAWYERS OBJECT TO BREACH OF COPYRIGHT IN PRODUCTION OF BLOATED, HUMOURLESS FLASH ANIMATION: Doubtless your sides have barely recovered from seeing that pisspoor pisstake on Woody Guthrie that's been cluttering up the few inboxes not totally spasmed out by My Doom.O this week. The good news is, in a rare instance of lawyers actually doing something positive for humanity, the guys behind the sledgehammer satire on Bush and Kerry have been ticked off for not asking permsission to pinch This Land Is Your Land before making the animation. JibJab haven't yet taken the song down, claiming that it's a parody and as such falls under fair use. The lawyers say it isn't:

"You can't just take someone's copyright and use it for some other purpose. A true parody is a work that uses a portion of a copyrighted work in order to criticize or comment on that work. It's the same principle under which you can quote a book, if you're writing a review of a book, without getting a license. Something is not a parody when there is no function of critique or comment on the original work. I think it's clear here that that is the case in the JibJab version of This Land."

We're a bit puzzled why attorney Paul Liscali thinks that a parody work is the same principle as fair use for review purposes - we ain't been to no fancy law school and we can see the difference.